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Sesame Workshop and Qualcomm Announce Mobile Technology Collaboration

It began with television. Sesame Workshop co-founder Joan Ganz Cooney looked at the television and realized we could be utilizing this powerful, evolving form of technology to educate children. 43 years later a willingness to use technology in groundbreaking ways remains a major reason why Sesame Workshop is an effective educational organization.

With that legacy of innovation in mind, we are proud to announce a new collaboration with Qualcomm centered on researching and developing new ways to educate children using mobile devices and applications. By bringing together Qualcomm’s cutting-edge mobile technologies and Sesame Workshop’s expertise in educating young children, Qualcomm and Sesame hope once again to revolutionize early childhood education.

The partnership was announced on Tuesday at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada.

One of the first educational products created by this collaboration will be Big Bird’s Words, an app that will feature Qualcomm’s Vuforia augmented reality platform. The app will make teaching literacy an interactive experience by encouraging children to use a virtual “wordscope” to search for and find new words in their surrounding environment.

And American pre-schoolers won’t be the only children whose educational experience will be improved by this partnership. Qualcomm and Sesame Workshop will continue collaborating in China and India through Qualcomm’s Wireless Reach program. In India, Sesame Workhop’s Galli Galli Sim Sim, the Indian version of Sesame Street, is using 3G mobile technology to distribute radio content, videos and fun lessons about healthy living, hygiene, literacy and math. This program is critical to reaching children in rural areas where televisions are not commonly owned.

In China, a project launching later this year will provide tips, activities and other tools to help families with young children prepare for emergencies. These are just two examples of ways mobile devices can positively impact young children around the world.

With each passing day mobile devices and applications are reshaping the way we engage with one another and the rest of the globe. With the help of Sesame Workshop and Qualcomm, it will also reshape the way we educate our children.